Security, Convenience

Moreover, from the private beta, Selipsky said Amazon already has
begun to see common use cases crop up for applications where there is
proprietary data or workloads that need to be able to move in and out
of the cloud, "like pharmaceutical companies with a lot of IP
[intellectual property], or Wall Street firms with proprietary
algorithms, or large media companies."
For instance, Eli Lilly is a global pharmaceuticals company using
on-demand resources from Amazon Web Services to support pharmaceuticals
research, collaboration, and high performance computing. "Eli Lilly and
Company is excited about Amazon VPC, as it gives us the convenience to
securely bridge hosts on our private Lilly network with the elastic
computing capability of AWS," said Dave Powers, an associate
information consultant at Eli Lilly and Company, in a statement. "We
can now seamlessly integrate our internal computing environment with
computing resources we've deployed on AWS, all without cumbersome
configuration or management hassles."

Meanwhile, software vendor Intuit leverages AWS for applications
ranging from scalability testing for its online products to cloud-based
engineering development and test environments. "Amazon VPC enables
Intuit to expand its use of AWS by making it possible to extend parts
of our existing on-premise security and networking policies to our
cloud infrastructure," said Jerome Labat, vice president of product
development at Intuit, in a statement. "We're looking forward to
continuing our work with AWS to deploy qualified applications securely,
reliably and cost effectively."

In addition, "Amazon VPC will enable our more than 200,000
enterprise customers to seamlessly expand their Citrix XenApp
infrastructures by adding highly secure and reliable on-demand
resources from AWS," said Frank Artale, vice president of business
development at Citrix Systems, in a statement. "By leveraging Amazon
VPC, our mutual customers now have access to resources that appear as a
natural extension of their current on-premises Citrix based
applications."
"Our enterprise customers are eager to take advantage of the
flexibility enabled by Amazon VPC," said Stephen Elliot, vice president
of strategy for CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business
unit, also in a statement. "CA's Business-Driven Automation solutions
together with Amazon Web Services can help enterprises to provision,
configure, monitor and manage computing resources to respond quickly to
changing business demands."
In addition, Amazon Web Services also announced AWS Multi-Factor
Authentication (AWS MFA), which offers customers additional
capabilities to access and control their AWS accounts. AWS MFA
provides an additional layer of security to the administration of a
customer's AWS account by requiring a second piece of information to
confirm a user's identity, the company said. With AWS MFA enabled,
users must provide a six-digit, rotating code from a device in their
physical possession in addition to their standard AWS account
credentials, before they are allowed to make changes to their AWS
account settings.

Amazon officials said AWS MFA will be offered as an optional feature
of AWS accounts and is easy to set up and use via the AWS web
site. AWS MFA will be available in the coming weeks; to learn
more and to be notified when it becomes available, visit
aws.amazon.com/mfa. And later this fall, AWS will also release
additional billing features that allow companies to link together a
group of AWS accounts with one account acting as the billing entity for
the group, providing additional visibility and control of a company's
total AWS account usage.
"The flexibility to add additional account security mechanisms via
AWS Multi-Factor Authentication has been frequently requested by
enterprise customers," Selipsky said. "We will continue to add features
to our services that make it even easier for more customers to leverage
the benefits of the AWS cloud."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.